bored beyond counting
by QueenPersephoneofHades
Summary: The Dragon Prince: He has no plans for an escape attempt. Written for Day 25 of Tumblr's 2018 Whumptober.


There are fifty-three stones of varying size ranging all throughout the cell, too far away to reach with either of his legs if he dared to try and stretch for one.

There are seventeen hairline cracks running up the walls, the result of age and the natural movement of the earth. One of those cracks goes all the way to the ceiling, and every half hour or so a single drop of water would fall from it to land in a small puddle, echoing oddly in the quiet gloom.

There are five sets of rusted manacles left rotting in the wall, not yet removed or replaced.

There are three fragments of what could be bones, shoved haphazardly into corners where they are hard for human eyes to make out in the lowlight.

Runaan had counted and tallied up all of these facts the day after he'd been brought in, and he'd re-counted all of them a number of times in the hours that had passed since then.

There was nothing else to be done; with his arms shackled to the wall at an angle that drained the blood from his hands and drove pain down into the top of his spine, any attempt at escape was unlikely to yield results. Especially when he could hardly feel one arm already.

But escape wasn't part of the plan, even if he could move all his fingers.

The job is done. The human king is dead.

And soon, Runaan will join the brothers and sisters who have already fallen on this doomed mission.

He just wishes the humans would be done with it already. Keeping alive would serve some kind of dark magical purpose for them, and he refused to be a part of it.

If starving himself would keep some scraps of power out of the foul human warlock's hands, then that is what Runaan would do.

He was already dead.

He just had to wait.

It is, perhaps unsurprisingly, not the warlock who comes to him some indeterminable time later that first day, after the king was dead and the princes were apparently gone, if the band still around Runaan's arm was anything to go by.

It is instead his daughter, the witch.

She enters with a basket with what looks like a fresh loaf of bread and Xadian fruit, a suspicious pout on her face as she walked straight up to Runaan and held the basket out.

"Food," she said unnecessarily.

Runaan studied the morsels without much thought, ignoring the yawning hunger chewing at his gut when the smells hit his nose. He glanced back up at her and raised an eyebrow.

She made a great show out of rolling her eyes and sighing in exasperation, before plucking one fruit out and holding it out to him. "Here. Eat it."

Runaan just watched her, silent.

"You know, you would make this a lot easier on yourself if you would just tell my father what he would like to know," she says. Her tone might be going for sly, but it comes off more as impatient and demanding.

The little witch was probably better with the humans' horrific black magic than with words.

If Runaan were lucky, she would talk him to death far sooner than use him for one of her barbaric spells.

He rarely ever was that lucky, if current circumstances were anything to go by.

"Forgive me if I sincerely doubt that."

He wouldn't bother responding, wouldn't risk giving her anything to work with, but re-counting the stone slabs in the wall doesn't sound entirely appealing at the moment, and she is here.

The least she can do is distract a dead Elf before his end.

The witch scowls, her entire face screwing up like she'd just smelled something foul. She shoves the fruit she'd chosen back into her basket and set one hand on her hip, eyes narrowed into slits.

"Well, yeah, everything would be a heck of lot less painful if you hadn't, I dunno, _murdered the King,_ but here we are! But you still have the option to cooperate and get a quick sentencing, ya know! Get it over with and save us a lot of trouble, that's for sure."

Runaan couldn't quite bite back a quiet scoff at that. "And help you create more abominations with your magic? I'd rather not."

"We're not going to use you for a spell!" The witch snapped back, face pinched up again as she pointed at Runaan accusingly. "We want your help and you're _not helping!_ You're just making everything worse!"

"Things tend to be rather awful after the death of a ruler," Runaan shrugged as best he could. This conversation wasn't as entertaining as he'd thought it would be; a dying Elf should not waste words with a user of dark magic, especially when she had nothing relevant to say or offer.

He focused on counting cracks in the ceiling again.

Eventually, the little witch grew tired of his ignorance; she threw her free hand up in the air and stormed back out of the cell with a wordless shout of frustration, the echoes of her feet stomping down the corridor echoing back to Runaan and eventually fading out.

Two hundred and seven steps until she was too far away for Elven ears to hear.

Runaan had no plans for an escape.

Not yet, at least.


End file.
